Impact Of A Scholarship: Billy Jones

“My theory was always ‘why not?’ There were a ton of players who had the ability but never got the chance to play in the ACC strictly because of their skin color.”

Billy Jones was a trailblazer and a hero. He did what he had to do, despite all of the hatred thrown his way. 

In December of 1965, against Penn State, Jones became the first Black basketball player on scholarship to don a Maryland Terrapins uniform and play in the Atlantic Coast Conference, breaking the color barrier.

Jones faced plenty of opposition day in and day out, but he expected that and it was not new for him. Maryland felt like the right place for him to get an education and play basketball and that’s what mattered to him.

“There was opposition,” Jones said. “I will not say [they accepted me with] open arms because when you’re talking about basketball, I could deal with the basketball side of it. I've had people hate me because I had the Towson [High School] uniform on all my life, so that was to be understood. But you're not involved with various things and you have second class citizenship and that was to be expected, at that point in time that's the way things were. So there was some opposition but that's what I wanted to do and actually it was no different than what I experienced in high school, so it wasn't like a new experience.”

Jones, a Baltimore, Maryland native, hailed from Towson High School just about 45 minutes from the University of Maryland campus. Jones and Towson won the Baltimore County championship three years in a row during his high school career. The state championship was played in College Park, which brought Jones down to his future school. Seeing the university prior to his recruitment, and the fact that so many people and some of his basketball and lacrosse teammates from Towson High School went to Maryland, Jones had his sight set on the Terrapins.

“I liked the place and most of the kids from my high school were going there,” Jones said. “My other options were Temple, Michigan and a couple other schools, but this just seemed like the right place to go.”

Jones’s high school coach, Randy Walker, served as an important mentor and gave him plenty of advice that increased his desire to play in the red, white, black and gold under an hour from home.

“My high school coach, Randy Walker, really taught me a lot about what I needed to do, what to expect and how to handle it,” Jones said. “So, I still thank him for being that advisor, if you will, but I just wanted to go to Maryland because it made sense.”

Walker and Jones spoke about things that Jones never told his teammates. 

Jones played point guard in high school and was an All-State player and State Tournament MVP at that position. But, when he got to Maryland, he never manned that guard spot, and Walker was very upset that head coach Bud Millikan was playing Jones out of position.

“[Walker] told me that you have to be able to accept what’s there and don’t complain, I couldn't afford to complain,” Jones recalled. “If I complained, there will be no more Black kids coming down here. So, I just sucked it up and let me do what I have to do to get on the floor and get minutes and that's basically what I did.” 

Academically, Walker told Jones to focus on getting his degree and as a person to just be himself and be a good person. 

“Be the person that you are, and the rest will take care of itself,” Jones recalled as one of Walker’s pieces of advice.

Jones would have never had the opportunity to attend college and further his education if it were not for the scholarship that he was granted.

“I could not have gone to college without the basketball scholarship,” Jones said. “That was my vehicle and it meant everything. It may have meant more to my mother and my community than me, I mean they were elated.” 

Because of the scholarship that Maryland gave Jones, he became the first person in his immediate family to attend college. This honor was not just a representation of himself or his family, but the entire community of those similar to him.

During junior high school, Jones and one of his fellow Black classmates were pulled aside by the principal of the school. The principal gave the duo some words that would stick with them very heavily.

“She told us very directly, ‘we are counting on you. You don't just represent yourself, you represent the whole Black community,’ which is pretty heavy for a 14-year-old, but that’s what she said and I just listened to that and just tried to stay true to myself and let me make my path as easy as I can by being a decent student.”

Aside from the opportunity to attend college, the scholarship allowed Jones to be the first Black player at Maryland and in the ACC. 

“Being the first, in some ways that is disappointing because it tells you all of the things that haven’t been done,” Jones said. “I felt I was the right person to do that, at least at Maryland. My point was ‘why not?’ The ACC didn’t even recruit Baltimore. We had very few kids going to major colleges out of Baltimore and we took that as an insult.”

Being the first Black basketball player at Maryland and in the ACC came with a lot of struggle and hardships, but for Jones, his attitude allowed him to ignore most of that.

Jones felt he did not receive calls from officials, he was hit harder and elbowed harder by opponents, but he refused to allow any of that to intimidate him, although it wasn’t easy. 

During a game at South Carolina, the ball rolled into the stands and Jones ran up the first few rows to corral the ball and bring it back onto the court. When he grabbed the ball, an older fan with a big hat and a cigar stared him directly in the eyes and yelled a racial slur at him without even flinching.

“He didn’t even move, it was like he was daring me to do something,” Jones said. “And I just looked at him like ‘this guy is crazy.’”

Several incidents also took place when hotels would not let Jones in the building, or let alone stay the night, and the Terrapins always moved to find a comfortable place for everyone. The team bus often had things thrown at it because Jones was on it.

“Just remember it was the south in 1968,” Jones said. “I was treated the same way, exactly the same way. People only look at you and try to intimidate you like why are you here, I mean deliberately try to intimidate you and you just couldn't have it.”

For Jones, mustering up the strength and courage to keep on doing what he was supposed to, as a student and athlete at Maryland, came fairly easy because of his upbringing.

“That’s what we’ve always done,” Jones said. “That's life in Baltimore County. We caught hell sometimes, but we also would kick your butt [on the court]. That was how it was. It was really nothing new.”

After his three-year career as a Terp came to an end, coming off two straight seasons of averaging double digits in points per game, Jones got into coaching. Over the course of 12 years, Jones spent time working with Maryland, American University, the University of California, Stanford University and Boston College. There were always people in Jones’s corner that helped him land these jobs all over the country, which is a direct result of Walker’s advice of being himself and the rest would follow.

Coaching came to an end for Jones and he went on to work for different resource companies before receiving a call from and being recruited for Disney. Like many of his coaching jobs, someone called Jones out of nowhere and recruited him to work for Disney. He helped build the sports complex in Orlando in 1996. He ended up spending 15 years working for Walt Disney Studios before retiring.

Through different career paths for so many years, one thing rang true through them all. What he learned as a student-athlete at Maryland helped him in everything that he did later on.

“Making decisions and I guess discipline, it takes a lot of discipline to be successful,” Jones said. “You have to have discipline, you have to know who you are and be self-confident, not cocky but self-confident and those were things I learned at Maryland. The biggest thing was not to complain. Somebody’s paying for me to go to this school and I wouldn't do it otherwise. So I didn't play the guard spot and I played the small forward spot and averaged double figures, I can't be mad. Somebody here is not playing, somebody here is not even on a college team. I had great experiences, met a lot of people and saw a lot of things, so from that standpoint Maryland really prepared me for the world.”

Jones will always be remembered as the first Black player at Maryland and in the entire ACC and despite paving the way for so many to follow in his footsteps, he thinks there is still much more to be done.

“There's a lot of great players and teams that come and go, there's cycles,” he said. “We’ve advanced, but we’ve also slid back and I ask myself, ‘why not’ because a lot of the dominant players out of the ACC have been people of color. In some ways we go back and repeat history instead of looking for the best opportunities and somehow we have to refocus on that. I think we’ve gone back in terms of having people of color run programs and that’s a shortcoming right now and I wish they could do better.”

Maryland gifted Jones with the opportunity to attend college debt-free and play the sport that he grew up loving just up north in the 410. Jones went through so much to give athletes of color so many opportunities at Maryland, the ACC and the NCAA, years later, because he was the trailblazer who broke the ACC’s color barrier. 

His ability to change the world was the way he thought about the world in the 1960s: “Why not?”